Aussie Web Analyst

I get asked sometimes which is the best metric to use when creating a certain report. My rough rule of thumb is to go back and ask what sort of question it is that you are trying to answer with this report. If it is related to:

• the number of people, use unique visitors
• traffic levels, use visits
• quantity of content consumed, use events

Caveat: there are certain times when you want to group people on a certain criteria.  Examples of this include wanting to know the number of people who accessed a certain site section or who arrived via a particular traffic source.  However people can view multiple site section and access a site via multiple traffic sources.  Therefore be aware that the sum of people via traffic sources, site sections and other similar situations will be more than the actual number of unique visitors to a website. 

If you want to evenly attribute a total between different options, you might need to choose a lower level metric.  The important thing in this case is to choose the metric which is independent for what you are looking at.  For example, a unique visitor may have multiple entry types but each visit only has a single entry type.  Unique visitors and visits can view multiple site sections but events are each from only a single site section.

Tags: Web Analytics, Web Metrics